With a total population of nearly 1.5 billion and an online population of around half a billion, there’s no denying China’s importance as a digital marketplace. It’s also one that has proven tricky for Western companies to operate in at times — like Google, whose famous struggle with the Chinese government over censorship issues ultimately led to the cessation of operations in China.

Microsoft, however, decided that Google’s departure was just the sort of opportunity it needed. After months of negotiations, the Redmond company has finally announced the signing of a deal with Chinese search giant Baidu that will see Bing provide English language results to its visitors. It’s a bit like the previous deal Microsoft scored with Yahoo! back in the summer of 2010.

As a result of that arrangement, Bing broke the 30% mark globally and supplanted Yahoo! as the number two search provider behind Google. Currently, Baidu maintains about an 84% share of China’s search market — which means this new deal should provide Bing with a sizable boost to its global market share.

While specific numbers aren’t given, a Baidu spokesperson said that daily English language requests numbered “in the millions” with the majority of those searches coming from municipalities looking for professionals and university graduates to add to their workforce.

While a few million searches per day won’t be enough to unseat Google as the grand poobah of search engines (it gets more than 400 million per day total), it’s still an important win for Bing. Every little bit counts, and Microsoft will happily continue inking deals like this one until it’s nipping at Google heels in the race to be number one.